HN Reader

What a good smartphone alarm app looked like over 10 years ago: https://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm...

Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597253

The real nasty bug (or feature, not sure) in the alarm app is that you have to wait for the wheel to bounce and come to a stop before the AM/PM part "sticks". If you just swipe and click save, it will keep the previous setting and then your important 7am alarm stays as 7pm and you're late for work.

The iOS clock app is so bad. Thank got we're getting AlarmKit in iOS 26 so people will finally be able to make custom ones. So many obvious features are missing, like a "keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow" button (useful for when you don't want to wake up early on labor day), calendar-driven alarms, etc.

I wish that at least the minutes/seconds were short lists, so you can quickly go to 00 instead of always overshooting and having to go back.

On PalmOS there was the app BigClock [0][1], where tapping on the upper part of a digit would increment it and tapping on the lower part would decrement it. That way you could quickly and predictably select any time with a few precise taps, without needing to rely on visual feedback like you have to with bouncy scroll wheels.

[0] https://palmdb.net/app/bigclock

[1] http://www.gacel.de/bigclock/bigclock.htm

That's just a solid hack to avoid having to have a custom widget. Well done, random engineer.

I wonder if this is because the code was just never looked at again after it was written or if it actually survived rewrites?

Back in the day the iPhone was notorious for messing up alarm timezones and failing to activate with DST changes… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-01-03/alarm-failure-leaves-...

Am I the only one mildly surprised but not bothered by this implementation choice?

Sure, making a true circular list is easy enough both computationally and code-wise. Nevertheless, it's still something "weird" and "unusual", yet another thing that has to be tested and understood and debugged. A linear list is on the happy path, and the difference isn't going to matter for anyone in the real world.

I'd personally have made it circular anyway just for the sake of my inner sense of correctness, but making it linear and finite is, IMHO, a defensible engineering choice.

One of the things I find most interesting is that the implementation for the Timer is distant from the Alarm. In the alarm you can roll over on the minute but you can't on the timer. Why these aren't implemented similarly is beyond me. Same with why it isn't circular.

Sounds like junk code that's adding unnecessary complexity.

And we didn't find out for over a decade.

Speaking of practical solutions, right?

I cannot figure out why the snooze and stop buttons are reversed for the alarm and the timer. For one, the stop button is in the middle of the screen, and for the other it's at the bottom of the screen. Why wouldn't this be standardized?

The time picker is implemented using a UIPickerView.

Tutorial for "UIPickerView - Loop the data" involves "simply create a picker view with a large enough number of repeating rows that the user will likely never reach the end".

I guess Apple didn't think OP would reach the end.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26063039/uipickerview-lo...

If you’re reading this on your iPhone, go to the alarm app, press the + button in the Alarms tab, and try to scroll to the top or bottom of the time picker

The comments here are full of people complaining about iOS alarm bugs, so for anyone else who is sick of this: Sharp makes a lovely selection of alarm clocks. For between five to twelve US dollars, you too can be freed for life from said bugs. As a bonus, the first thing you touch in the morning, and the last thing at night, will no longer be a device that is socially engineered to destroy your mind for profit.

I have the Sharp Twin Bell, one of the higher end models at $12.63 from Walmart.

Technically aren't the CPU cycles required to make it circular (via logic) a tradeoff to a list of 500 numbers stored statically (small size)

I love how this is actually interesting, got 10K upvotes on reddit, but was removed by the subreddit mod team for not being interesting enough.

Reddit sucks.

Anyone done the tedious work of figuring out the list length?

Just wondering how they determined the length was enough? Was it constrained by a datatype or just an assumption on user behavior?

This was the kick I needed to finally release my stuff and overcome perfectionism once and for all.

Also: I can't use the alarm app anymore now.

I just learned there is a bug wherein the timer will complete normally but fail to emit any sound. I have had this happen to me multiple times when using the timer for cooking and it has been driving me nuts.

The explanation said this could occur when the timer is set for the same number of minutes as the screen-lock setting. I suspect, however, it is more likely the screen-lock event and timer-end event occurring simultaneously since neither is deterministic.

If only they took it as a hint that the whole linear-circular design is bad as it removes any predictable fixed points... But no, let's do bad hacks instead

Feels like an API that was backed by lazy cons lists like Haskell's would give you actual circular lists for free here.

In case anyone else hasn’t discovered this, you can long press on the digits to bring up keyboard entry.

I hate that I had to find that by accident.

The time selector in a new calendar event is another case where it's a long list, not circular.

This reminds me of the infinite hole gag from The Stanley Parable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQ-OqEGhVc tldr: It is a mostly infinite hole

Reminded me all the hacks we had to use to emulate loops in Excel formulas. Good times.